


Little Spy Academia episode 3: The Spies of Seville.

by flobknocker



Category: Little Witch Academia
Genre: 285 words of explosion, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Gen, I'M NOT DEAD, big important update, this started as a shitpost and grew legs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:00:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21564925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flobknocker/pseuds/flobknocker
Summary: Following the vents of the last two episodes, Akko and red team head out to investigate what caused the killbot to go haywire, and stumble onto some big revelations. Also i wrote an explosion that's 285 words long.
Relationships: why does everyone have to be in love on this darn site?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Little Spy Academia episode 3: The Spies of Seville.

**Author's Note:**

> As per last time, some violence, but nothing crazy or excessive. Apart from that, some more serious threat at one point, but really, as per usual, if you can take Casino Royale, this should be fine.

The Green Team dormitory was a veritable hive of activity by the time Akko got there.  
She knocked on the door enthusiastically, and after a second or so, Constanze opened it. Constanze frowned at her, then let her in.  
Inside, all of Blue team had assembled themselves on Constanze’s bed, while Sucy lay draped across the top bunk, in front of Amanda and Lotte, and Jasminka sat on the bottom bunk. Outside, the night was clear, and the lamplight in the room created a soporific atmosphere that was entirely at odds with the serious nature of the meeting that she had arrived for. The soft light made everyone’s outlines seem fuzzy, and Akko was unwittingly reminded of her childhood, when her mother would tell her stories, and her father would tuck her in at night.  
Constanze hoisted herself onto the table, and Akko took up a space next to Jasminka, who hugged her without any prompting. Jasminka gave the best cuddles.  
Stanbot walked out from beneath Constanze’s bed, and Akko tilted her head to the side in puzzlement, but before anybody could address her confusion, Diana cleared her throat.  
“Now we have everybody here, I have an announcement to make.”  
The gentle hubbub in the room dissipated, as Diana reached into a pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. She held it aloft for all to see, then laid it on the bed.  
“I have authorisation direct from Director Finnelan, to hunt down Croix Merides. As of now, Operation Arcturus is officially sanctioned, and sits exclusively in my hands: I expect no objections when I say that nothing said tonight leaves this room. Understood?”  
There were hushed tones of approval from around the room, followed by silent shock: such an agreement between an agent and one of the directors was almost unheard of. For Director Finnelan to have officially signed off complete control of an entire operation to Diana, dire emergency protocols must have been invoked.  
“Good. As the leader of this operation, you all answer to me - and me alone - and I answer to nobody but Holbrooke until this matter is put to bed. I also have the authority to veto any and all assignments handed to you by your superiors.” Diana paused, to let the severity of her words sink in before finishing.  
“Make no mistake, Luna Obscura is on war footing.”  
There was more murmuring, but the room fell silent again once Diana held up her hand.  
“Following Amanda’s assignment in France, it is increasingly clear that Croix is aware of Luna Obscura’s efforts to shut down her operation, and as such we can expect a retaliation in the coming days. It is also likely that whatever larger plan she may have will be accelerated considerably. Therefore, it is imperative that we launch a mission against her organisation as soon as possible.”  
Diana stopped, then gestured to Amanda, who picked up the briefing.  
“And that’s where we come in, folks. In his last moments, Stanbot one-point-four - bless his circuits - dispatched an encrypted data packet to Alcor, and Constanze spent the whole night decrypting it. The last things that Stanbot sent home were the words I did my best and an exact copy of the signal that the robot received before it went nuts.”  
Akko noticed Constanze pulling the new Stanbot closer to her, and she couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Amanda continued.  
“Turns out, the killbot we encountered has a nifty little feature buried deep in its operating system, that sends a request to kill things indiscriminately if it detects friendly fire. Lucky for us, our friends at Appleton aren’t the greatest marksmen, and the fracas at the palace triggered the request. The response, however, came all the way from spain - specifically, a ritzy nightclub in Seville. I say we bring the hurt there.”  
There was a palpable sense of unease within the room, as Amanda finished her piece. Though they remained as tight-lipped as ever, Hannah and Barbara moved closer to Diana and began watching her to see how they should respond, while the bunk above remained uncharacteristically silent. Jasminka even stopped eating.  
Though Amanda seemed outwardly keen to see Croix’s infrastructure dismantled, her experience in France had clearly made her far less enthusiastic about the concept of going into the field again so soon. Diana held steadfast, her expression unreadable, while Hannah and Barbara became visibly agitated. Even the complete lack of any activity above her, told Akko all she needed to know about the mood of her teammates.  
The silence in the room was too much to bear. Akko raised her hand.  
“I’ll do it.”  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
“Hey, Lotte, how come Diana’s got all the cool stuff in her car? I mean, Amanda’s got the bikes and the weird tank thing, and Diana’s got all sorts of gadgets in her car. What do we have?”  
Lotte pushed a button, and cupholders flipped up from the seats.  
“Sweet,” Sucy said.  
The drive from the airport had been long and somewhat fraught. For three hours, Akko had proven herself incapable of remaining silent for more than five minutes, and Sucy had insisted on cranking up her playlist from the minute they left the airport. As it turned out, Sucy liked acid jazz.  
Akko didn’t.  
Between Akko contorting herself into every conceivable position that the seatbelt would allow, and Sucy threatening bite her if she so much as touched the radio, Lotte hadn’t had a moment of peace for the whole journey. Turning off the engine was a weight off her shoulders.  
“Eyes and ears,” Akko said, and Lotte reached for her earpiece, but she hesitated before putting it in. Usually when Akko got to say that, she relished it like an excited puppy, but this time she was unusually quiet about it, and a quick look into the back seat confirmed that Sucy had noticed it, too. Sucy gave a subtle nod of acknowledgement, then went back to putting in her contact lens.  
Once the three of them had affixed their communications equipment, Akko opened the door, and the three of them stepped out into a warm and dry night. Closing the doors caused an echo in the car park that lasted a considerable amount of time, and when Lotte opened the boot, she felt a trickling sense of dread. Without a word between them, they each got their bags, and checked each other over for any visible equipment, before Lotte closed the boot and locked the car.  
The light from the indicators seemed blinding in the gloom.  
They remained still for a few seconds more, until Akko gave a wave and a disarming smile. “Come on, we got this,” she said, as she started walking towards the exit, and Lotte followed, almost believing her for a moment.  
For the five minutes it took them to get from the car to the club entrance, Akko acted like nothing was wrong, and even gave the bouncers a cheerful wave as they patted her down. When it came to her turn, Lotte couldn’t help but tense up as the bouncer checked in her bag. Nevertheless, she was waved through as expected, and Sucy followed quickly.  
Once inside, Lotte could scarcely imagine a greater shift in atmosphere. Outside, the night was quiet, and the air was still, and refreshing, while inside the club, hundreds of bodies writhed and swayed against one another like an unfamiliar tide, and the air was positively saturated with a mix of sweat and drinks. Lights flashed and swung and swivelled, and lasers seemed to slice through the steam and smoke that emanated from the dance floor. And the noise. Nothing could have prepared her for the noise. Even the sound of sustained gunfire seemed preferable to the relentless pounding of the massive subwoofers, which almost knocked the breath out of her lungs with each passing second. Vibrant melodies came from the speakers so loud as to drown out her own thoughts, while nonsensical vocals made it hard to even put those thoughts together.  
She couldn’t understand a single word of what was playing, but some of the words sounded similar to what Akko sometimes murmured in her sleep.  
“Akko’s blending in!” Sucy shouted into her ear, and lotte yelped in shock. Once she had calmed her nerves, Lotte looked through the crowd, and found that Akko was currently standing in the middle of the dance floor.  
Her moves could charitably be described as clumsy.  
Figuring that Akko was currently taking some time to actually enjoy herself before the real work started, Lotte made her way to the bar, with Sucy in tow. There was a considerable crowd by the bar, but after a minute or two, they managed to get to the front, where a plain-looking young woman served them.  
“What can I get you?” The bartender said, and Lotte reached into her bag for her purse. “Nojito please,” Lotte replied, and Sucy leaned in, to add “cranberry juice”.  
The bartender nodded her acknowledgement, and turned away, allowing Lotte time to reach into her bag again and pull back the secret compartment.  
Her hand rested on her gun, and she felt some small comfort knowing it was by her side, but ultimately, she shifted her hand and gripped a small container. Lotte pulled it out and passed it to Sucy as discreetly as she could.  
The bartender finished the drinks and handed them to Lotte, who paid with a 20 euro note.  
“Release them in the bathroom,” Lotte said, and Sucy nodded her agreement.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Glad to be granted reprieve from the maddeningly cheerful strains of J-pop, Sucy slinked into the bathroom.  
In stark contrast to the main hall, the ladies’ bathroom was all white tiles, chrome, and porcelain, drenched in cold LED lighting that made it seem more like an operating theatre than anything else. Here, the music only swelled enough for her to feel it in her feet, as opposed to her teeth.  
As luck would have it, there only seemed to be one person in the room, and she had just finished washing her hands.  
Realising that if she hung back until the other girl left, she might miss her chance, Sucy made a beeline for the third stall along. She locked it briskly, and then pulled the small black container out of her bag.  
Footsteps now passed the stall door in the direction of the exit, and Sucy took her opportunity to open the container.  
Immediately, six tiny drones flew upward, their sound drowned out entirely by the insufferable music from the dance floor. One by one, they swirled up or down, and filed out of the stall in a neat, orderly fashion, leaving Sucy alone in the stall.  
“Wait, one’s missing,” Lotte said.  
Though the deafening music could easily have made Lotte’s tone sound more urgent than necessary, Sucy didn’t want to put her faith in that option. Sucy pressed her finger against her earpiece.  
“I counted six,” Sucy said, being sure to speak clearer for Lotte, given her surroundings.  
“There should be seven, though. I got seven back from Paris, and I haven’t used them since: check if one of them hasn’t deployed for me, please?”  
Sucy turned the container upside-down, but no pesky drones fell out.  
“Still six,” Sucy said, and Lotte seemed to go worryingly silent, before commenting again.  
“Wait, there’s a woman going in there now. She looks dangerous.”  
Sucy narrowed her one visible eye. The door made a noise as it opened, and Sucy unlocked the stall, before getting up on the toilet and squatting down, so that she couldn’t be seen from outside. She reached into her bag again and gripped her gun, but quickly decided against it.  
Even if nobody heard it, the evidence would be impossible to hide. Instead, Sucy removed a small, black pouch, and used the straps attached to it to secure it to her left leg.  
There was an audible gasp from Lotte’s end.  
“She’s got a gun. Sucy, get out of there now!”  
Sucy pulled up her dress and opened the pouch carefully, allowing her access to five differently coloured darts. “How big is she?” Sucy whispered.  
“About average size.”  
The door to the first stall banged open, and Sucy ran her fingers along the set of darts, then settled on the third one in, and pulled it out, ready to throw.  
The second stall clattered open, and Sucy noticed the shadow of the woman under the stall. She gripped the dart tighter.  
The door burst open.  
Sucy hurled the dart underarm as quickly as she could, and dived for the ground, moments before the woman pulled the trigger. Even with the noise outside, the sound of the gunshot was startlingly loud, and the sound of the tiles bursting into shards mere centimetres away from her head seemed even louder. The world around her tumbled and span, as Sucy hit the ground and rolled, and until she sprung to her feet, the only confirmation she had that her dart had hit, was a quick yelp.  
But once she was standing, Sucy knew her dart worked.  
The woman twirled around and tried to level the gun, but instead, simply dropped it, before lurching forward into Sucy’s waiting arms. The woman thrashed around weakly for a few seconds as she tried to fight the effects of the dart, but shortly afterward, she stopped, and became like a sleeping baby in Sucy’s embrace.  
After checking around to make sure nobody saw, Sucy hauled the woman into the stall, and removed all the bullets from her gun, before locking the door.  
Sucy took her dart out of the woman’s midriff and threw it into the toilet, then jabbed her ear again, to talk to Lotte.  
“I just had to lay a woman out in the toilet. Mission’s scrubbed.”  
From the sound of the reply, Lotte seemed to have moved herself to a quieter part of the building, but it didn’t change the fact that her response was sadly, not what Sucy had hoped for.  
“I’m… not so sure that’s a good idea, Sucy,” Lotte said, and for as much as Sucy wanted to take advantage of her timid nature and just dig her heels in until she gave up, Lotte technically held rank over her. Besides, Akko had finally decided to join the conversation.  
“Yeah, Sucy, we only just got here.”  
Sucy ground her exceptionally sharp teeth, “That’s exactly my point. Usually you have to screw up before I dart somebody.”  
“Wait, you had to dart somebody?” Akko exclaimed, loud enough for the dance floor to hear her. Sucy rolled her eye, “It was non-lethal,” she said, more to pre-empt a lecture from Akko than any other reason, “Look, this lady’s going to come round in about an hour, maybe less. We need to be out before that happens.”  
There was a pause from the others, and Sucy thought for a moment that she’d managed to talk some sense into them, but Akko saw to that. “An hour… we’ve done that before, we can make that work,” she said, and Lotte chimed in with agreement, sounding much more certain of herself than she did earlier.  
She wasn’t getting out of this one.  
“I know it looks bad right now, but we’ve already deployed my helpers: if we can just find the antenna and disable it, then we can all get out before this gets out of hand.”  
“And how do you plan on doing that?” Sucy grumbled.  
“I reckon if we just set fire to the most expensive looking stuff we can find, then that should work,” Akko offered, and Sucy had to take a long, deep, breath to stop herself from doing anything rash.  
“I know it doesn’t sound so good, Sucy,” Lotte added, “but it won’t take long for my helpers to find the room, and then we can just barge in and follow Akko’s lead.”  
“So your whole plan is just barge into a room, burn stuff and run?”  
“Uh-huh!” Akko replied, in a tone that implied that she hadn’t picked up on the sarcasm at all.  
“You’re both idiots.”  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Akko might have been upset if she hadn’t heard Sucy call her an idiot so many times before.  
At this point, she wasn’t sure if she meant it as a term of endearment. Nevertheless, Sucy’s sentiment wasn’t lost on her. Though the unconscious woman in the bathroom put a time limit on the mission, it didn’t change the fact that her plan did, in fact, boil down to just barging into a room and burning things.  
“Okay, Lotte, I’m heading to the bathroom, get ready to hand my bag to me and tell me when your eyes in the sky find something.”  
Once she’d finished speaking, Akko left the dancefloor and strode purposefully over to the bar, where Lotte was still sat. Lotte handed Akko her bag, and Akko noticed that the lights in her glasses from the video feeds were indistinguishable from the reflections of the lights.  
So long as she was sitting there, nobody would ever know Lotte was looking over the whole building at once. Clever, Akko thought.  
With her bag now slung over her shoulder, Akko slipped past the last few revellers, and made eye contact with Sucy as she came out of the bathroom. Sucy nodded to her.  
Once inside, Akko chose the first available stall, and began setting herself up.  
Her bag was significantly bigger than Lotte or Sucy’s bag, to accommodate her gun, and Akko took that out from the secret compartment first, then the leg holster. The holster was a custom design that Director Ursula had made especially for her, and Akko felt a rush of excitement as she fastened it to her right leg.  
She didn’t have Sneaky Chariot’s thighs, but Akko figured she looked good with the gun strapped to her leg. It even looked just like Chariot’s holster, too; right down to the white, four-pointed star on the side.  
The bag also contained five rounds of ammunition, and Akko loaded them into the gun one by one, being extra careful to close the close the gun gently, incase the hammer came forward unexpectedly and set it off. She put it in its holster. With her gun loaded and ready, Akko retrieved her wand from the bag, and set it to lockpick mode, then put it into the loop, sewn into the back of her dress.  
“I think I’ve found the room,” Lotte said, and Akko jabbed her earpiece as she tidied herself up.  
“See? Told you we could do this, Sucy!” Akko said, in a tone of voice more akin to yodelling than normal speech, which appeared to startle a woman who had come in to do her makeup.  
There was nothing she could say that would make the situation less uncomfortable, so instead, Akko opted to leave the bathroom.  
“Fifty minutes,” Sucy said, as Akko left the bathroom.  
Akko made eye contact with Lotte over at the bar, and gave her a firm nod, then looked round for Sucy. She was standing over in a corner, with her back to the wall, looking bored. Lotte finished her drink up, and joined Akko, and together they went to Sucy.  
“One of my drones got into the VIP room upstairs-” Lotte began, “There’s a door at the back, leading to a staircase that’s not in the blueprints.” She took out her phone and pointed to a room off the side of the main dance hall, and Akko inspected it closely, as if she knew what she was supposed to be looking at.  
“The VIP room’s on the second floor, and the bouncer on the door looks huge,” Lotte explained. Both Akko and Lotte noticed Sucy selecting a dart.  
“No more darting people,” Akko said, and Sucy scowled, before closing the pouch. “Forty-Five minutes,” Sucy said.  
Lotte looked flustered, but Akko continued, as if Sucy hadn’t just reminded them of the very little time they had before utter mayhem broke out: time was of the essence, and morale among her team was at an all time low. Even if she didn’t have a plan, Akko had to pretend she did.  
For their sake.  
“Okay, Sucy,” Akko snipped, then turned her attention to Lotte.  
“Lead the way.”  
Seemingly relieved to be moving at all, Lotte gladly led the way, and Akko noticed a few of her drones had come down to circle around the three of them, as they made their way to the stairs. It made sense to have some extra eyes watching over them in a crowd, though Akko wondered where the other drones had gone. The building was unexpectedly large, and with a drone in the right place, Lotte potentially saw everything.  
They went up to the second floor, where a balcony full of revellers danced just as hard as the ones on the ground, and up here, Akko could see more of the architecture of the building.  
From the ground, it had been difficult to see, but up here, it was clear the building used to be a church. The massive, vaulted ceiling held part of the lighting rig, and speakers had been placed on the ancient stone walls, or sometimes suspended from cables, to better fill the room with noise.  
Though she held no particular faith, the idea of fighting inside a church didn’t sit well with her.  
Just as Lotte had said, there was a VIP room at the other side of the balcony.  
Akko looked down on all the partying guests as they moved towards the VIP room, and saw an undulating, pulsating swamp of youthful energy, oblivious to the murky currents beneath their feet. A swamp she herself might have been part of, had she not found her love for espionage through Sneaky Chariot.  
Wherever she went, Akko continually found herself in a bizarre paradox of inclusion: she could blend in with a crowd or a group, but no matter how hard she tried, she would always find herself on the outside, looking in.  
She fitted in everywhere, but only belonged with Luna Obscura.  
Briefly, Akko wondered if Diana experienced the same feeling of exclusion, but came to the conclusion that she didn’t. Diana was a shark. If it were possible, Akko was sure that Diana would have her feelings surgically removed.  
With her little mental aside resolved, Akko walked the last few steps to the bouncer, and said, as plainly as could, “there’s a woman with a gun passed out in the bathrooms.”  
She could feel Sucy glaring at her back, but Akko continued.  
“She tried to kill my friend, but she slipped and knocked herself out.”  
The bouncer looked incredulous, “are you serious?” He asked, and Akko nodded.  
“Deadly serious.”  
The bouncer glared at all three of them, then pushed a button on his radio, and spoke Spanish into it. They waited about a minute for a response, during which, Akko could feel Sucy trying to kill her with just her mind, until eventually, the bouncer’s radio chimed, and an excited voice said something that sounded urgent.  
Lotte would have offered to translate, but the look on the bouncer’s face told Akko all she needed to know.  
“I’m so sorry, girls - quickly, you’ll be safe in here,” he stuttered, then stood aside, and ushered them into the VIP room. For a moment, Sucy stopped stabbing her in the back with her eye, as they entered the room, and the bouncer shut the door.  
That didn’t last long.  
“Five minutes-” Sucy growled, “we now have five minutes before the police get here and want to talk to us.”  
Lotte tensed up at the thought of having to talk to the police, but Akko quickly ensured that she didn’t dwell on that thought for long, by pointing to the door that Lotte had found earlier. As naturally as she could, Akko led her team past the various young men and women in the VIP room, and positioned herself next to the door. She looked around quickly, to make sure nobody was watching, then pulled her wand out and set it to lockpick mode.  
The door yielded in seconds.  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Beyond the door, was a dingy, and dull concrete landing, with stairs that led up to another level, and another flight that led down into what may as well have been an unfathomable abyss.  
Akko went first.  
The moment Lotte closed the door behind them, they each drew their weapons, and made their way upstairs. Akko led the way, with Sucy following her, and Lotte taking the rear.  
It was hard to hear any activity coming from the top of the staircase over the music, but Akko felt one of Lotte’s drones whizz past her head, and suddenly felt safer, knowing that they had an early warning.  
“There’s a big, heavy, door upstairs. That has to be the room,” Lotte said, and Akko led the way, but stopped just three stairs short of the top landing.  
The ground had just moved.  
“Did either of you feel that?” Akko asked, before realising that she’d spoken far too loud for her current environment. “Maybe it was the subwoofer?” Lotte offered, but the constant thump of bass said otherwise. Sucy just shrugged, and pressed on.  
Fearing that dillying - or in deed, dallying - would result in being subjected to more of Sucy’s poison experiments when they got back, Akko climbed the last of the stairs, and used her wand on the door. Unlike the one earlier, the wand took a good twenty seconds or so to overcome the lock, and once they got in, it became immediately clear why.  
Propped up on a table in the middle of the room, three different speakers played unintelligible noises and words into microphones, and all around the speakers, stood a multitude of computers, servers, network apparatus and radio equipment. Quite unlike Alcor, which was - by comparison, at least - a much more compact system, the mess of equipment Akko saw looked like the work of amateurs. Cables lay coiled and wound and splayed across the floor, while even over the music downstairs, Akko could hear the sound of cooling fans working at capacity.  
None of it looked right.  
Sucy had already begun searching in her bag for her makeup kit, which contained a variety of cleverly disguised incendiaries and corrosives when Akko held up her hand.  
“Wait… don’t burn anything.”  
“Three minutes,” Sucy droned, but no matter how insistent she was about it, Akko wouldn’t let Sucy silence her instinct. Lotte seemed to have picked up on the same sense of unease.  
“No-” Akko said, shaking her head, “- this doesn’t look anything like the kind of stuff Croix makes.”  
If it were possible for Sucy to grind her teeth, Akko was certain she would be doing so. “Fine, why not? Why don’t we just abort the mission now?” Sucy said, and the look on Lotte’s face said more than enough about her state of mind.  
Sucy was right, of course. In mere minutes the police would arrive, and they would have to escape. Even if they did manage that, then Croix would surely hear of their ill-fated escapade and use it against them.  
No matter how she sliced it, the blow to Luna Obscura would be huge.  
“Akko’s right,” Lotte interjected, “I’ve seen the weapons she sells and the hardware she makes: Croix wouldn’t put something this sloppy together…”  
Lotte stopped, and swivelled on her heels to face Akko. “we didn’t check the stairs going downstairs!”  
“It’s better than nothing,” Sucy said, noncommittally, before adding “two minutes.”  
With no better option available, Akko had to agree with her teammates, tough she pouted and tapped her foot for a while as she tried to come up with any other options.  
“Downstairs it is!” Akko cried.  
Brandishing her gun overenthusiastically, Akko charged down the stairs with her teammates in tow, stopping only momentarily, to check if anybody in the VIP room was looking for them. They weren’t, and so Akko continued her dash into what was rapidly becoming an architectural paradox.  
After about fifteen steps, the staircase ceased being the expected length, and instead continued seemingly ad infinitum, into the black abyss. After a while, it started to smell different: much less like a church-come-nightclub, and more like the London underground. On and on they went, further and further down, until Akko began to worry that they may in fact be marching their way into hell itself. At long last, though, they finally saw a concrete landing, illuminated in stark, white light, and once they reached it, none of them could hold back a gasp.  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
They had come out on to a platform for some kind of train, deep underground.  
Akko looked around to see if anybody was watching them, then holstered her gun, and walked forward to study the tracks. Lotte and Sucy promptly came to join her, and together, they concluded that the whole arrangement was, indeed, weird.  
By the side of the track was a path, wide enough for a couple of people to walk on without having to worry about being hit by the train, which she assumed was there for service personnel. The tracks themselves, however, were stranger still, with the standard two rails being accompanied by a metal tube in the middle, big enough for Lotte to crawl through.  
“So this is what caused the shaking upstairs?” Lotte remarked, and Akko pondered the thought, before nodding vigorously.  
“Pneumatic system,” Sucy said, offering her appraisal of the strange tracks, “it’d use less electricity than a normal train. Must go some way to hiding it from the authorities.”  
“Makes sense,” Lotte said, then began to look worried, and Akko noticed that she hadn’t put her gun away. Akko softly gestured for her to put down her weapon, and it took Lotte a full five seconds to comply.  
Her adventure in Paris had clearly taken its toll on her.  
With Lotte now somewhat pacified, Akko lifted a finger in the air to get her teammates’ attention. “Well, I think we should go and investigate this-” she said, making a show of confidence that gained her a withering scowl from Sucy, “after all, we got this far. Sneaky Chariot wouldn’t have given up here, and neither should we!”  
Just saying the name of her hero buoyed Akko’s spirits, though it did nothing for the others - yet, as she found confidence in herself, she noticed that Lotte and Sucy rallied with her.  
“Sure. Beats the alternative,” Sucy muttered, and Lotte gave a firm nod. Taking their responses to be about as positive as she could hope for, Akko pointed down the seemingly endless tunnel, and began marching towards the end of the platform. Lotte and Sucy followed close behind.  
\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
For nearly an hour, they walked down the service path, during which, the train rushed past them only once.  
Its unusual propulsion method rendered it as silent as it was possible for hundreds of tonnes of metal travelling at thirty miles an hour to be, and as it passed, Akko noticed that there weren’t any windows on the train. Of course, it suited Croix to use an unmanned train to transport supplies - that way, there would be less people to leak information.  
To keep their spirits up, Akko made sure some amount of idle chatter was going on at any given time - lest they realise they were walking into the dragon’s lair.  
“And then Jaden finds out he’s got a crush on Maria, but they’ve got to keep it all a secret from the werewolves who run the KGB, so it’s a really slow burn, and he only leaves Nicole to be with Maria in book seventy...”  
Thankful to not be the immediate target of Sucy’s ire, Akko was glad for Lotte to continue her passionate explanation of the Skyfall series. Sucy seemed to have simply switched herself off to avoid further irritation, and though Akko had thoroughly lost track after book four, she had no intention of stopping Lotte. If it put her at ease, then Akko would happily listen to the description of every last one of them. Lord knows they’d had to endure her waffling about Sneaky Chariot for at least that long.  
It took Lotte a full summary of two more Skyfall titles for any of them to pick up any new sounds.  
Eventually, an ambient hum of activity began wafting towards their ears, and after a few more minutes of walking, Akko had to order her teammates to be silent. Like cats, they slunk towards the end of the tunnel, where they stopped at a barrier and looked down.  
If the railway had been unexpected, the complex that Akko looked down on, left her short of words, if not breath.  
“It’s huge,” Lotte whispered, before her drones all rushed past their heads, to get a better look at the facility.  
Below them, a veritable swarm of people in labcoats and dark suits walked between colossal, ruinously expensive machines - many of which connected from one to the next by a complex network of conveyor belts. Even from some four levels up, Akko could see guns rolling out of the machines. Standing sentinel around the fabrication area, were no less than four robots, armed to the digital teeth with cutting edge weapons, and primed to execute anybody foolish enough to do anything that the management disagreed with. Barrels of chemicals, and crates of what she assumed were explosives, were all arranged in neat piles and rows around the room. Vehicles ranging from humble quad bikes to tanks were placed by an unfathomably large tunnel at the opposite end of the great cavern, waiting to be taken somewhere. The ceiling was vaulted, though the masonry was chipped and discoloured with age, and dark green walkways, fastened into the walls, ran around the entire expanse. Important-looking people walked along them to get into offices buried deep in the rock - offices whose windows allowed light to spill out onto the dingy work floor.  
“I’ve never seen that much hardware in my life,” Akko remarked.  
“Or people,” Lotte said.  
There was an uncomfortable silence as they waited for Sucy to say her piece. “Lots of people-” Sucy said, “-if only there was a way to poison them all at once. Some kind of airborne toxic vapour, maybe…”  
“Sucy, that’s a war crime!” Lotte hissed, and Sucy responded by giving them a sincere look of exasperation.  
With Sucy’s suggestion firmly quashed, Akko looked along the walkway they were on, and saw that there was a clear route to one of the offices. It looked important, and that made it a high priority target.  
But before she could give the order to move, something caught her eye.  
It almost didn’t look like anything at all, and Akko initially thought she’d imagined it, but no matter how much she tried to rationalize it away, her instincts told her to fear it. For all the world, Akko couldn’t rid herself of a deep need to flee. Then she realised she’d seen it before.  
Akko stopped looking at where she could swear she’d seen the vaguest outline of a person, and instead, turned round, to look at a cargo lift.  
“I’m going to do something. If I say run, you scatter.”  
Sucy and Lotte took firm notice, as Akko moved her hands to her sides. Akko glanced over her shoulder, then clapped her hands as hard as she could.  
Her hands were silent.  
“Run!”  
Akko wheeled round on her heels and snatched at her gun, but before she could even take it from its holster, a terrible spectre of a man leapt at her, incapacitating her, before reaching for Lotte.  
There was a hiss, and cloud of smoke erupted around them as Akko thrashed and flailed, trying to reach for the wand, but the man had already grasped Lotte by then, and threw them together, before applying a taser to their necks.  
Akko felt her whole body go rigid, then entirely limp.  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
As the smoke dissipated, Sucy watched from two levels down, as her teammates were carried deep into the bowels of the facility.  
In the chaos, she had been quick enough to deploy a smoke bomb to cover her escape, but neither Lotte nor Akko had been so fortunate, and that left her with a dilemma.  
Whether or not to save Akko and Lotte.  
Luna Obscura’s official line on what to do if one or more of the team got captured, was both simple and immutable: leave them behind. Under normal circumstances, Sucy would have had no qualms about complying, but something uncomfortably close to compassion bid her to stay.  
That she would hesitate at all, infuriated her.  
She ground her teeth, clenched her fists, and shook her head as she tried to pick the sensible option, yet in spite of her best efforts, Sucy found herself unable to commit to making the retreat. Clearly, spending so much time in Akko’s presence had made her go soft.  
That and her old nemesis, the Geneva Convention, prevented Sucy from doing the one thing that made most sense to her right now. If she was going to rescue her teammates, she would instead, have to use some thoroughly “Akko” tactics.  
Sucy carefully withdrew herself from the stockpile of weapons she’d hidden herself amongst, and surveyed the scene below her. Save for an amount of shock and awe from the workers, operations seemed to be going along as normal on the shop floor, while the robots guarding the whole affair didn’t seem to have reacted at all. For all the commotion that had just gone down, Sucy remained miraculously undetected.  
For the moment, Sucy decided it was best to observe for a little longer.  
From further up, it had been hard to tell quite what was going on besides guns being made, but now she was closer to the floor, Sucy could now make out precisely what was being built on which lines. Towards the back, a set of machines were making handguns, while a far larger line in the middle was churning out assault rifles like the ones Lotte had described to her, but it was the machine in the near left corner that caught her attention.  
Marked with all manner of warnings, a whole shipping container full of a mysterious substance was being unloaded by a team of people, all of whom seemed to be treating the canisters in their hands, as if merely sneezing on them would invoke the end of days. Sucy watched with fascination, as each canister was carefully emptied into the top of rockets, which slowly made their way along a conveyor belt, and into a crate, ready to be shipped.  
With the amount of care the people handling the canisters were taking, Sucy had to assume that it was an extremely dangerous substance, which meant that the missiles could only really be one of three things.  
The first possibility was a chemical payload; some kind of corrosive, incendiary, poisonous or otherwise nasty substance released on impact. It made sense, but the size of the missile meant that proliferation of the chemical agent after impact would be rather limited, and so, as dirty as Croix was, Sucy had to assume that she was looking at something else. The second option was biological warfare; perhaps a virus or a hardy strain of bacteria, to be released on impact, or dumped over a city. A deliciously despicable tactic, granted, but another glance at the container didn’t reveal any biohazard warnings, prompting Sucy to favour her third explanation.  
Thermobaric weapons.  
If Lotte was right about the clientele, Croix was selling fuel-air bombs to terror cells across the world, and the effect that kind of weaponry in such hands could have made Sucy feel uncomfortable. It was one thing to be supplying insurgents with sophisticated guns - it was entirely another thing to be selling them the kind of weapons that crack tanks open like tin cans.  
A plan formed in her mind, and she didn’t like it one bit.  
Fearing that she had no better option, Sucy walked up to the lift that ferried the train’s cargo from the platform at the top, to the pit below, and called it.  
It groaned and clattered into life, and Sucy braced herself for the whole facility to come down on her, but when the lift came and retribution didn’t, she breathed a sigh of relief, and jabbed the button to go up.  
“This is stupid,” Sucy muttered to herself, “you’re going to get yourself killed over a couple of nerds.”  
Then she laughed. “It’s gonna look awesome, though.”  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Akko took one last look at Lotte as she was whisked away into another office, then braced herself for the inevitable impact with the floor, as a goon all but hurled her into Croix’s office.  
Akko pushed herself up, but the goon quickly placed a hand on her shoulder, and held her in place as he took her gun and wand from her. In order to make sure that she didn’t move any further, Croix pointed her gun at Akko.  
“Thank you, you can return to your post now,” Croix said, sounding more tired and annoyed than anything else.  
In contrast to the rest of the facility, Croix’s office had a lush carpet and fine furnishings, with pictures and decorations on the exposed stone wall, and a bundle of cables as thick as a tree branch on the floor, running along the entire right wall and into a hole. The left side of the office was just one long window, which was angled outward, to allow Croix to look down on her operation. The same laptop that she’d had in Italy sat on the desk, open, waiting.  
Akko scowled at Croix.  
For her part, Croix put her feet up on the desk, and smiled, subtly.  
“You’re a lucky girl, Kagari. I’m not in the habit of taking prisoners; it just so happens that you’re one of the most interesting things to happen to me in a long time.”  
Akko glared hard at her, but made no effort to move. Luna Obscura had always taught her to avoid antagonising any captors should she find herself in such a situation, but Sneaky Chariot had always maintained that a little abuse or a scowl always made the experience that bit better. In the end, Akko had decided to pick a middle ground.  
“You see, I like to throw out a little bit of bait for the spies in the world as part of my operation. So, when I circulated the rumour that I was selling a briefcase with the identity of every active spy in the world, I expected a pretty big player to turn up. Naturally, the daughter and sole true descendant of Bernadette Cavendish falls into my lap, but I’ve got sources, Kagari: you’re not her usual entourage.”  
Akko wondered just how expansive Croix’s network was, but realised her head would hurt if she tried to think of the full scope, and went back to scowling.  
“Now, unless policy changed dramatically since I was there, Luna Obscura prefers to send spies out in groups of two or three, and usually the same two or three to make sure the team functions best. So after our last meeting, I’ve been wondering what changed. Interestingly enough, Kagari, there’s no record of international spies with your name, so that means that somebody at Luna Obscura decided to send a complete novice into the field with Diana. And of course, that doesn’t sound like the kind of order that any of the directors would give.”  
Akko tried desperately not to let on that Croix was right. She scowled as hard as possible.  
“But then, after our last little tete-a-tete, you went and did something particularly interesting…”  
Croix trailed off, and picked up Akko’s gun from the desk. It buzzed, and the barrel didn’t move from its safe position.  
“Curious... “ Croix muttered, before turning her attention back to Akko.  
“Apart from turning an expensive car into a piece of expressionist art, you fired a weapon whose report I’d not heard in years. And so, that night, I found myself tossing and turning, because I couldn’t get that sound out of my head. Then, of course, there’s the fact you mentioned Sneaky Chariot with such gravity - there’s not that many spies these days that would do that. So I took a little while, did some sums, had an unexpected incident in France, and now I believe that you could well be the key to a personal side-project of mine.”  
Croix lowered her voice, and Akko found herself leaning in, in spite of herself.  
“Would you like to know who Sneaky Chariot really is?”  
Croix pressed a button on her laptop, and turned it around to show her.  
The screen showed a dark, uninhabited room, with bunk beds and a large desk, and a poster of Sneaky Chariot on the wall, by the bottom bunk. The camera lifted up, and Akko gasped.  
\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Since being tied up, Lotte had been left to stew with her thoughts for a full ten minutes.  
It was a typical interrogation technique: leave the victim alone in a room for a while before the interrogation started, and let their imagination do the rest. Oftentimes, whatever the victim could think up was far worse than anything the interrogating party had at their disposal, and so Lotte instead, chose to think of Sucy.  
Nothing that Croix’s goons had could possibly beat Sucy’s poison collection, and if Sucy was smart, she’d already have escaped by now.  
Assuming Sucy hadn’t already just deployed poison gas against the entire complex, then as soon as she reached the surface, Sucy would contact Luna Obscura, and the rescue protocol would spring into effect. The directors would look at Sucy’s lens camera and work out where she was, and send Lucic, Babcock, or maybe even Director Finnelan to rescue her.  
If they were feeling like sending a message, they could even send Sergeant Nelson.  
In spite of her dire circumstances, Lotte smirked at the thought of Nelson arriving in six hours and turning the entire complex inside out and upside down with just her bare fists. Truthfully, though, Lotte was much more scared of what might be happening to Akko right now, than any unpleasantness that might befall herself.  
Last time she’d been tied up like this, she’d had Amanda to keep her company, but now Lotte just found herself moderately bored. The man should have come back by now. He was late.  
More to stave off boredom than anything else, Lotte recalled the Skyfall books, and just how many times Jaden had found himself in similar situations; by book seventy-two, he’d grown so accustomed to the whole ordeal that he’d begun falling asleep during them. Perhaps it would serve her well to try sleeping, anyway - if nothing else, it would be a great way to annoy her captor.  
There was also the reassurance that Croix’s organisation was a whole lot more professional than Appleton were. Appleton kept her around for a while and then decided to try out their new robot on her, but Croix would surely keep her around for as long as she was useful, which would be more than enough time for Nelson to get her rip and tear on.  
The door opened, and the man that had dropped her into the poky little office reappeared. He was a wiry, gangly-looking man, with a touch of stubble, and an angular face, and eyes that seemed to bulge just a little. Lotte wondered if she could take him down with her bare hands - he certainly looked flimsy enough that she stood a good chance.  
“Alright, so here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to beat you up, and you’re going to tell me everything you know. I’d like to say the procedure’s more involved than that, but experience says that keeping it simple works best, so let’s get down to business, shall we? Who do you work for?”  
Lotte shrugged.  
“Luna Obscura,” Lotte volunteered, not bothering to really raise or lower her voice. “It’s a spy organisation that trains girls in the art of spycraft. Your boss came from there, if I understand right,“ she added.  
Her interrogator raised an eyebrow.  
“I’m sure you just want to get the information you’ve been asked for-” Lotte explained, “so really, it makes it easier for both of us if I just tell you what I know. That way it’s as pleasant as possible for both of us.”  
The man seemed to consider this for a good, long while, before nodding, and asking his next question.  
“What’s your interest here?”  
Again, Lotte replied honestly, “we’re investigating the origin of a kill-signal issued to one of the robots. It went rogue in France, so we want to know why.”  
“Hmm. I see,” the man said, and began to ask his next question, but Lotte found her attention taken by the little flying insect that had come in through the vent in the top of the room.  
“Okay, so how did you find our production facility?” He probed, and Lotte shrugged as much as her binds would allow her to.  
“Akko found the decoy room. We would have been fooled, but the hardware up there was organised really sloppily, and we headed downstairs after we felt the train under our feet. We followed the train from there…”  
She kept going, but noticed that the bug had landed on his shoulder, and added “and then we ended up here!” To make sure that the bug continued to go unnoticed.  
“Very g… ow!”  
The interrogator quickly slapped at his shoulder, and Lotte saw the little insect fly away, but when the man directed his attention back to her, his expression was vastly different.  
“Wait… what’s going on… OH GOD WHAT ARE YOU!”  
The man appeared to have lost all grip on reality, and suddenly, Lotte found herself feeling most uneasy, as he began quaking in fear at her.  
The door opened.  
“Hi there,” Sucy droned.  
As if he were about to explode if he didn’t move, the man whirled around, and caught Sucy’s cold, dead, gaze.  
Sucy smiled, baring her whole brace of teeth.  
“Sound the alarm. Get everybody out. Now.”  
Either in defiance, or just through overwhelming fear, the man remained rooted to the spot, and so Sucy reached up to her face. Lotte watched in awe as Sucy slowly revealed her left eye, and though the man blocked her view of what lay behind Sucy’s hair, Lotte didn’t need to see to understand its effects.  
By the time the man had left, blubbering and wailing in terror, Sucy had returned her hair to its rightful place, and Lotte felt relief wash over her. Whatever lay behind Sucy’s hair would remain a mystery.  
“What did you do to him?” Lotte asked, and Sucy held up the insect that had stung the man earlier. It lay motionless in Sucy’s hand, and when Lotte inspected it closer, she found that it was a tiny drone made to look like a bee or a wasp, which carried its own stinger, like the real thing.  
“My own special brew. He’ll be screaming at his own shoes for hours,” Sucy explained with a grin, and Lotte realised that Sucy must have administered a hallucinogen powerful enough to make elephants freak out. If it made Sucy smile, Lotte didn’t ever want to experience it for herself.  
Come to think of it, Lotte realised, that would explain why Akko spent a whole day walking around Luna Obscura with her eyes wide open, saying ‘they’re coming, they’re coming’ a couple of months back. But then she wondered about what Sucy had said to the man, and gave her a confused stare.  
“Wait, Sucy… what did you mean by get everybody out?”  
Sucy raised her one visible eyebrow.  
\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
The drone flew out through the window of the red team dorm, and Akko felt like crying as she watched it sail into the night.  
Save for the security lights, there was nary a single glimmer of activity at Luna Obscura. Not one agent sneaking around, nor any robots and drones whizzing about; not even movement in the trees. Complete and utter stillness. The half moon provided just enough light that Akko could make out the finer details through the screen, and she recognised the old TV in the window of the green team dorm.  
Amanda was probably sleeping inside, and she dreaded to think what awful contraptions Croix might come up with if she were to infiltrate Constanze’s lab.  
The drone continued making its way around the outside of Luna Obscura, passing by the library, and hovering by the blue team dorm, where she could see a solitary light on inside, and the outline of Diana against the curtains.  
The view felt way too much like watching Diana through a rifle scope.  
With her point well and truly made, Croix moved the drone on, sending it straight to the New Moon tower. It climbed rapidly, and Akko got a good, clear view of the whole building and the surrounding forests. The view was quite extraordinary, though Akko couldn’t focus on anything but her overwhelming dread.  
The drone climbed higher, and Akko saw the vent on top of the New Moon tower, that allowed Alcor to dump its searing hot exhaust air. The drone moved closer.  
“I see you never got round to fixing that cooling issue, Chariot,” Croix remarked, being sure to say it just loud enough that Akko could hear. Just loud enough to make her eyes go wide with fear.  
The drone went down the vent.  
After a second or so of descent, the drone emerged on the inside of the New Moon tower. The light from Alcor’s screens and LEDs cast a ghostly off-red light over the room, and Akko caught sight of Director Ursula in her bed, turned away, before the drone continued its way down, and turned round.  
Through the drone’s tiny camera, Alcor looked like a towering, impenetrable, monolith of technology, but Akko didn’t get much time to marvel at it, before another screen in Croix’s office lit up, and the drone flew straight into an exposed USB port. Akko saw a clever mechanism of tiny suction cups deploy to stick it on to the side of the computer, then the video feed went black, as the drone completely connected and began interfacing with Alcor. The second screen lit up and displayed a stylised white crow, below which, a password box waited patiently to be filled out.  
Akko felt a thrill as she realised that even after somehow swapping out one of Lotte’s drones with her own, and getting into the New Moon tower, Director Ursula had thwarted Croix at the last stage with just a simple password.  
Croix tapped her keyboard and the main menu appeared. She made sure to turn round and give her a wry smile before she went on.  
“Ursa Major. You really haven’t changed at all, have you, Chariot?”  
All of Luna Obscura’s private data and all the power Alcor held over the agents was now at the mercy of Croix’s cruel fingers. Croix clicked on the firearm activation icon.  
Another password prompt came up, and Akko felt a bitter sting in her gut on top of the despair, as she remembered how forgetful old Director Ursula would usually put in her password wrong at this stage. If she was indeed Director Ursula.  
No, Croix was lying. She had to be.  
With a flurry of keyboard taps, the firearms log and activation program opened, and Akko saw every single shot fired by a Luna Obscura agent in a list, with the exact time it happened, and the name of the agent responsible. Just two minutes ago, one of the girls in Yellow team had fired her gun, and Akko could only hope that was the last time she’d needed it.  
Croix moved the mouse over to an icon in the top right hand corner, labelled “disable all” and hovered the cursor over it.  
It was originally supposed to be a safety feature, so that the directors could remotely kill an agent’s gun in the event that they ever went rogue, or if a disagreement threatened to come to blows. Alcor’s sensors on top of relays on top of dishes and antennas ensured that throughout the world, Luna Obscura’s palmprint verification was enforced, as were all other forms of biometrics and communications.  
Croix clicked the icon, and filled out the password prompt. Then the screen went black.  
It was impossible for Akko to maintain her composure as she watched Croix grinning triumphantly, but for as much as she expected Croix to start monologuing, instead, Akko watched her become agitated.  
Clearly the screen wasn’t supposed to go black.  
The drone’s screen lit up again, and Akko wiped away her tears in time to see a woman dressed as Director Ursula lift the drone, and glare at it. The woman’s intense red eyes matched her scorching red hair, and Akko’s heart fluttered, as she realised that Sneaky Chariot had just caught Croix’s drone, and was now looking daggers through the screen. In the few corners of the image not taken up by her idol, Akko saw bright yellow and red lights flicker, before Sneaky Chariot crushed the drone between her fingers, and the transmission ended.  
And then the door burst open.  
Clearly shaken by Sneaky Chariot’s reaction, Croix jumped as Lotte and Sucy rushed in. Taking the opportunity to escape, Akko leapt to her feet, as both Lotte and Sucy brought their guns to bear and pulled the trigger.  
The guns buzzed, and did nothing else.  
Croix quickly regained her composure, and pointed her gun at the three of them, but Sucy pulled the `trigger again, provoking nothing but an empty clicking sound. Sucy got six more subsequent clicking sounds before she gave up and just threw her gun at Croix. Croix stepped to the left and the gun sailed past her head. She fixed her eyes on Lotte.  
“Oh, so you must be Lotte,” Croix said, after deftly avoiding the airborne pistol. Lotte trembled, but Sucy stood firm. “I understand you’ve heard that sound before, haven’t you, Lotte? In Paris, perhaps? In the company of a few Appleton agents?”  
Croix pointed to her laptop, and Akko felt a sudden rush of hatred towards the loathsome thing; no matter how hard she tried to get the upper hand, Croix always seemed to have a trump card up her sleeve - or on the screen, for that matter. “Biometrics are a wonderful thing, aren’t they? They let you instantly verify somebody’s identity, anytime, anywhere: from a grand palace in France to a twenty euro note in a nightclub in Spain. I’s just a pity security didn’t get to give you the full welcome package upstairs.”  
Given that it was now clear that Croix could potentially identify any of them from anything they touched, Sucy seemed to be remarkably calm about things, and while Croix stared her friends down, Akko took a moment to glance down at the facility.  
Which was now completely empty.  
The killbots remained in place, as if nothing had changed, but Akko realised the whole facility had emptied some time between her being taken into Croix’s office, and her friends’ arrival. Another quick glance at Sucy revealed the even more alarming fact that Sucy seemed to now be smiling. Nothing good ever came of Sucy smiling.  
Sensing her confusion, Croix stopped menacing Lotte, and turned her attention to Sucy, then to Akko. “what’s got into her?” Croix asked.  
As it turned out, a train crash was what had got into Sucy.  
Before the first whistles and chirps of the track, or the rumble of the train as it hurtled towards its destination, Akko felt the ground move. It trembled, swayed, and finally shook, as the train neared the end of the track, and only on the last stretch, did Akko hear any of the awful noises it made before crashing through the buffers. By the time it had reached that point, even Croix turned her head to watch.  
The train smashed through the buffers and tumbled down into the pit below, where it crushed a killbot, trashed almost all of the equipment below, and sent chunks of concrete and metal flying. The carriages behind it plummeted down after it, spilling their contents out, until the fourth carriage ruptured on impact and sent a white mist up in a plume.  
Sucy cackled.  
The mist filled the cavernous facility, and Akko tilted her head in confusion, as everyone else in the room backed away. Far below, one of the killbots that had been hit by the debris sent out a friendly fire authorisation query to Croix’s servers. In moments, that query came back positive, and the robot targeted the still-crashing train. It armed the main gun and fired.  
From a single muzzle flash, the vapour ignited, and Akko watched as the air itself became a swirling mass of fire and destruction. In an instant, the vapour ignited, and decimated the window, spraying her with fine particles of superheated glass, before the force of the explosion picked her up and tossed her against the wall with extreme force. The compression from the explosion forced searing hot air and smoke into her lungs, and Akko felt her insides burning as she battled to stay conscious. The sound of the explosion in her ears lasted only a few moments, before the sheer force hammered her eardrums into submission, and with her hearing now gone, Akko soon found herself surrounded by an awful blackness. Every single light in the facility had been completely and utterly annihilated by the all-consuming fireball, and with the initial detonation gone by, the flames had begun to retreat into the writhing cloud of putrid smoke and debris. The smoke coiled around her, stinging her eyes and forcing her to cough - anything to expel the air that threatened to melt her lungs - but the moment she did so, the air around her shifted again. In the wake of the brutal compression and raging inferno, there now existed an almost perfect vacuum, and to fill it, Akko felt the air being sucked from her lungs. Breathless, deaf, and effectively blind, Akko tumbled forward. Her scorched hair covered her face and her clothes gave off strange smells, as the air now flooding into the cavern rushed over all the hot, dry materials. Finally, with atmosphere restored, everything that the explosion had touched began to burn, and Akko took in another lungful of hot, hostile air.  
Coughing, spluttering, and only dimly aware of the fact that her hearing had begun to return, Akko pushed herself up onto her knees, and looked around.  
By some miracle, Lotte had survived the explosion, too, as had Sucy.  
Unfortunately, so had Croix.  
Akko thought she heard a cough from the other side of the room, and in the dim light of the fires, she began reaching around for anything she could use as a weapon. Hot glass, large wood splinters, Sucy’s gun, and wads of still-smouldering carpet presented themselves to her as Akko fumbled for anything she could use as a weapon, until her hand landed on something familiar.  
Croix stumbled to her feet and grabbed her gun, before pointing it at Sucy, and by reflex alone, Akko swung her gun out in front of her to challenge Croix.  
The gun bleeped, and the top of the gun clicked forward into firing position.  
“Leave her alone!” Akko cried, coughing and hacking as she battled against the noxious fumes from the fires. Croix stared with a blank expression - clearly dazed, too - before narrowing her eyes. Sensing their opportunity to leave, Lotte and Sucy made their way to the door, and Akko backed away from Croix, keeping her gun trained on her, just incase Croix tried anything.  
“Oh, Chariot, you sneaky little worm,” Croix muttered, but beyond that, she didn’t do anything. Instead, she just stood in her wrecked office, watching as Akko made her way out of the office, backing slowly away, until the billowing smoke obscured her vision, and she finally turned round.  
Akko felt her hands twitch as she safely released the hammer on her gun. Sneaky Chariot wouldn’t shoot Croix, but now, Akko didn’t feel so sure that she could keep the same promise.  
————————————————————————————————————————-  
The flight home from Seville had felt long, and uncomfortable, and no matter how much they tried to clean themselves up, none of the red team could truly shake the narrowly-survived-a-thermobaric-detonation look.  
It wasn’t exactly a stylish look, and would be particularly unwelcome for any spy, but by some miracle, the three of them managed to get back into the UK without being stopped by security. From there, it had been as close to plain sailing as driving home in the small hours of the morning after surviving an explosion could be. Unlike the journey to the nightclub, there had been no arguments between Sucy and Akko, and the couple of times that Lotte had needed to pull into a petrol station served as welcome respite from the strain of trying to stay awake.  
Soon enough, motorway turned into dual carriageway, turned into streets, turned into B-roads, turned into dirt tracks through the forest that surrounded Luna Obscura. Throughout the journey, Akko had faded in and out of sleep on the passenger seat beside her, and Sucy remained comatose until the very end of the journey, so Lotte was the first to see the chaos.  
She noticed the plume of smoke first. It climbed into the sky, thick and foreboding, before dissipating at a few thousand feet and coiling around the moon. The silvery light gave it a spectral hue, and Lotte felt as if the reaper himself was looking down on her.  
She almost stopped the car there and turned around.  
It took a few sharp nudges before Akko woke up, and substantially more persuasion to rouse Sucy, but once her friends were awake, they, too, felt her sense of dread. The headlights of her little yellow Fiat scoured the trees as they pressed on, and Lotte watched the smoke spreading across the ground as they got closer to home, until the headlights weren’t necessary any more.  
She parked on the drive, and the three of them got out and gazed in wonder at the chaos.  
The flames from the New Moon Tower rose high into the air. Around the bottom, agents and directors, and staff of all shapes and sizes, busied themselves fighting the blaze. Hoses spewed water, lights strobed, sirens wailed and moaned, and amidst the chaos, the directors were huddled together, calling all the agents still in the field on their personal phones. Even over the din from the firefighting effort, Lotte could hear the urgency in the directors’ voices as they recalled every agent one by one.  
Akko went to say something, but before she had chance, Amanda rushed over to them and almost choked trying to get her words out.  
“Ursula went rogue!” She yelled, and Lotte had to back off from the sheer intensity of Amanda’s outburst. The rest of Green team joined them, and before either Sucy or Akko could ask any more, Amanda continued her verbal onslaught.  
“She torched Alcor and took off into the night! The guns are all dead, communications are down, agents disappeared off the grid and all the safehouses locked up! What happened to you three?”  
Constanze made a wild gesture, and though Lotte didn’t understand it, she was certain that the gesture was in all-caps. Jasminka just ate crisps nervously.  
“Sucy blew us up,” Akko explained, without any kind of resentment in her voice, but then she shrunk into herself, and Lotte noticed that even for having survived an ordeal, Akko wasn’t herself.  
“You okay, Akko?” Amanda offered, but Akko didn’t respond. She seemed lost in thought, as if the fire were just a minor inconvenience, and she was chewing over something much more difficult. The chaos around them muted Akko’s murmuring and grunting, but after a little while, Akko cleared her head.  
“Wait, where’s Diana?”


End file.
